A good, hard ride with friends and teammates is always a pleasure — you’re challenged to keep on your stronger friend’s wheel, and you work together to stay as a group over terrain’s rolling pitch or into a headwind.The first to the top of the climb rolls slowly down the backside of the hill, letting everyone else glom back on until the group is complete again.

Someone in the group flats so the whole group stops and waits; despite any perceived impatience from some quarters, most cyclists are grateful for a chance to catch our breath, take a drink, and tighten a bolt or two. Just don’t take too long filling that tire back up.

Riding though, is sometimes better solo.

Out the door at your own hour, setting your own pace. The dynamic of a group changes so much with the weather — those days you want to relax, work up a sweat, you’re dragged along at speed and inevitably working the front, sprinting for the townline sign. The days that you want to ride hard, you’re riding with novices to the sport and while it is always a pleasure to encourage the new to cycling, sometimes you wish they were just a bit faster.

The solo ride takes care of all that. You have no one to blame if the route is a bad one. If you want to stop at the top of a climb and take things in, you can without feeling pressure. And if you want to work on your sprint after a bad day at the office, you can sprint ‘til your knees and heart explode.

But we all know this already.

The real pleasure of the solo ride is that the only voice in your head is your own, urging you on. The beauty of cycling is the freedom it affords — we can go almost anywhere by our own two legs as we could with plane or car — it just takes longer, is all. The solo ride enhances that freedom.